Hope, Or Something Like It
by silentmusic16
Summary: In which a goddess struggles with very human feelings.


**I tried here to get into the mind of a goddess, one with very human origins. I hope you all enjoy this.**

 **I own neither the series nor the cover photo.**

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Of what use were feelings to a goddess? Compassion, regret, pity, love for a singular and individual person? When one exists outside of time, outside of the physical realm, where do those feelings air themselves? Where do these emotions develop, grow, or end? Madoka, all-seeing, knew not. She didn't know many things despite her godhood, her omnipresence, and triumphant victory in all parts and places time unending where a witch could have - but now didn't, now _couldn't,_ exist. Godhood was not perfection, it seemed, not even for a being of pure hope.

Somewhere out of space Madoka watched magical girls and waited for their moment of absolute despair when most they needed her, needed hope above even precious life. From her celestial perch the angelic goddess sent out an aspect of herself to stop that awful despair from consuming the poor girl, whoever she may be, from becoming just another tally in the Incubator's heat death prevention plan. A girl sold a dream that would grow into a nightmare if Madoka didn't preside over those pitiful child soldiers. Madoka watched over all magical girls with the compassion and affection of a mother.

But one girl in particular stood out among the countless others in immeasurable time: Homura Akemi; her best friend, protector, and devotee from the time that the goddess was a much more humble existence - a time, many time-lines that didn't exist and yet left deep, savage scars on the heart of the lonely girl who couldn't any longer remember the selfless suffering she went through for a certain to-be goddess. Homura Akemi: filled with the same double image of a world with and without Madoka Kaname and unable to discern which was more _real_ than the other. She lacked the omniscience of the embodiment of hope, the ability to understand this division. A pity indeed.

Madoka remembered perfectly the first set of time-lines - or rather the first universe, before she forced a rebirth with her world-changing wish. She remembered being Homura's friend and mentor. She remembered their battles together, the good and the bad, the victorious and tragic in any number of overlapping time-lines and re-do's. She remembered the way her heart broke - the way she broke Homura's heart just as badly - when she betrayed the girl with the kindness of a final grief seed, and worse still, when she pleaded with the crying, crumbling girl to kill her lest she become a monster.

She remembered loving Homura. In the beginning of the black-haired girl's quest, when together they fought as equals her love bloomed naturally through every reset. She could not have known, at the time, how much Homura was sacrificing but she loved the girl all the same for her devotion, her determination, and her utter selflessness. And in those time-lines where Madoka was protected, was a golden bauble in need of a guardian, she made up _that_ love later - after her own selfless sacrifice. After she could no longer _be_ with Homura, by virtue of their unequal forms of existence.

This was where her problem loomed, gray and oppressive. Madoka could not regret her decision; it was made in the interest of those who had come before, and would come after her, into the fold of magical girls. It was a wish born of a selfless desire to give hope to the hopeless and honor to the unhonored. But in her heart (so far as a goddess could have a heart in this sense) what humanity she had left regretted leaving her friend and lover to the cold world below. To a world without witches, but with the demonic collections of negative human emotion in the tall, wretched wraiths. Alone, with the half-memory of some girl with pink hair and ribbons who meant the world to her, who meant more than the world to her, Homura went on aimlessly.

The goddess remembered with great sadness - with as much sadness as a goddess of hope could feel - her final meeting with dear, darling Homura. They were everywhere and nowhere at once, in a frame of space and time where a new universe was being born and an old one was dying around them all at once. It was then that the knowledge of the previous time-lines filled Madoka. Then that Madoka understood, cherished, loved everything about Homura. But it was too late to give the girl back even a fraction of what she'd given up to save Madoka. The goddess could offer only comforting words and a red silk ribbon for Homura's troubles. This failure of compensation Madoka regretted most of all. What was a promise? What was a ribbon in comparison to lifetimes of sacrifice and oceans of tears?

On her celestial throne Madoka watched Homura continue to push forward in a world where she didn't belong, as a magical girl burdened with a wish that would never be fulfilled. A wish that simply could never be fulfilled because the selfsame Madoka she swore to protect _did not exist_. The goddess could do nothing to help, not even something small, like what she offered Sayaka. She could only split herself into impossible multitudes and continue to save magical girls as she worried for the one friend she couldn't save. She had to continue onward herself with all of the hope the embodiment of such could muster.

A miracle: the largest source of hope for Madoka laid in a single blind-spot in her all-seeing omniscience. A point, a blank in time and space precariously connected to the path her precious soldier marched down. Maybe, if she could not see this future - if she could not see this possibility, she could let hope fill her heart that once more she might be able to be at Homura's side. There must be a reason she could not peer into this endless void in an otherwise understood universe.

She could, for just a moment, envision the two of them in a field of flowers beneath a pearl of a moon. They'd be together. They'd be in love. It'd be perfect.

Certainly the very embodiment of hope could hope for nothing sweeter.

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 **Reviews and criticisms are very appreciated. I was going for something different from my usual writing with this, so I'd like to know whether or not I succeeded.**

 **Thanks for reading!**


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